The Republican Party was the overall winner in Thursday's presidential candidates' debate, former White House Chief of Staff John Sununu told
Newsmax TV on Friday, but Donald Trump was the individual loser.
"He went in there as the frontrunner because people like the words he had been using," Sununu, who served President George H.W. Bush, told "Newsmax Prime" host J.D. Hayworth. "They touched a chord, but what they saw last night was really an attitude and a demeanor that a lot of people are now very uncomfortable with in terms of whether or not this guy is a real candidate."
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"If anybody as an individual was a real loser, it was Trump — especially when he was the only one to raise his hand about not being willing to commit to support the nominee," Sununu continued. "He's trying to use that threat to bully the party and to bully the process, and the last thing in the world that this party needs is to be supportive of a bully."
He added that the GOP "came out as the winner" of the two-hour contest. Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor, is the author of the new memoir,
"The Quiet Man: The Indispensable Presidency of George H.W. Bush."
"They showed they've got 17 candidates who showed up, and all made a pretty good presentation. Virtually all of them, with one or two exceptions — and I don't think I want to go into the exceptions. Presented their cases well as they could."
"This is the beginning, not the end," added. "There's going to be nine-to-12 total debates in this primary cycle … , and so it's just the beginning. I hope people aren't trying to draw too many conclusions from step one."
The questions from the Fox News moderators were fair, Sununu said, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush recovered from his earlier misstep on Iraq.
In response to the question from Megyn Kelly, Bush responded that "basically, the problem in Iraq today is the result of the withdrawal of all the American forces.
"Where he had trouble in the past, the question was 'knowing what you know now,'" Sununu said, referring the introductory phrase Kelly used in the question to Bush in a May interview.
"That phrase is a very broad phrase, and I don't really know what we know now," Sununu told Hayworth. "I don't know if we know everything we think we know now.
"I'm not surprised that when somebody answers a question with a broad phrase like that in it that you might get an answer that is answering a different question than the questioner actually intended," he added. "That happened to him the first time around — and then they dug themselves in a hole trying to deal with that."
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